Relishing life with the Brothers – and texting the feds about all of it

Steven “Red” Goode recognized the money in that math, but he couldn’t afford the buy-in.

So he negotiated a deal with ABT captain Rusty Duke, a crystal king in Dallas, to front him a half-ounce, for a payback price of $450.

Carol Blevins, a confidential informant for Homeland Security Investigations, texted details of the deal to her handler, Steve Lair.

Rusty Duke was one of the prime targets of the investigation.

The feds wanted Rusty, a prime target in the six-year investigation of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.

They believed he moved major weight through North Texas – good stuff, 80 percent pure, broken into ice blue-tinged shards, and stashed with bundles of cash at drop houses.

Red’s pickup rattled up a ramp to Interstate 20 about noon that March day in 2012. A thunderstorm still hovered over Tyler after snapping power lines and flooding creeks overnight.

His old Ford needed new wiper blades.

Carol sat next to him, pecking on her cellphone.

She texted, “2758 Dowdy Ferry Rd,” and soon after, five federal task force officers pulled into position near the low-slung ranch house with an overgrown yard.

“Who are you texting?” Red asked.

Hundreds of pages of law enforcement and court records provide the basic chronology of this scene – the surveillance of Rusty Duke, traffic stop along Interstate 20 in Kaufman County, and the arrest of Red and Carol.

Descriptions are based on interviews with multiple sources who either witnessed the events or produced reports about them. Public documents, weather reports, photographs and other research materials were used to fill-in blanks and cross-check information provided by sources.

Quotes are based on interviews with Carol. When possible, her account was verified using police records available to the public, as well as confidential records gathered during the federal investigation of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.

Carol played it off with an eye roll: “My sister.”

They pulled in the driveway at 1:15 p.m.

The drug deal seemed routine. Rusty took a double sandwich-size Tupperware container and a scale out of a kitchen cabinet. He weighed out two quarter-ounce piles, one after the other, and slid them into clear plastic baggies.

Red asked Carol to “crotch” the drugs when they got back in the truck. It’s an ABT thing; featherwoods stash drugs in their underwear because male cops can’t search there.

They turned east toward Tyler.

The feds waited until Red crossed into Kaufman County before asking a Texas Highway Patrol officer to make the stop. East Texas juries, agents say, hand down stiffer sentences than those in Dallas County.

As Red slowed to pull off the highway, a text appeared on Carol’s phone: “You’re getting pulled over. Just a normal traffic stop. Don’t worry.”

Carol texted back: “It’s on me!”

She didn’t see Lair’s reply until she got out of jail 30 days later: “Get it off of you!”

Under questioning, Carol surrendered the meth and told the trooper it belonged to Red, but he booked both of them into the Kaufman County Jail for possession.

Soon after, a task force officer pulled Carol into an interview room.

“Give us some time,” he said. “We didn’t expect the dope to be on you.”

Odessa connections

The stakes soared during the summer of 2012, as the investigation galloped into the homestretch, with key cases riding on Carol’s intel.

They trusted me. The guys in Odessa had trusted me full out,

Increasingly, prosecutors sensed an opportunity to pull off a landmark case. With luck, and a single indictment, they might sever the head of a deadly street gang – perhaps for the first time in history.

The Department of Justice attorney leading the case, David Karpel, planned to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law passed in 1970 to take out the Mafia.

To do it, he’d need to prove the Brotherhood was a crime family primarily motivated by money, not a gang organized around racist ideology. The RICO statute allows prosecutors to charge those who order and facilitate crimes, as well as those who commit them – exactly the type of evidence provided by Carol.

She sensed tension in Lair’s voice.

His standing rejoinder, “Hang in there,” was replaced by the terse, “I don’t want to hear your bulls---. No excuses.”

Carol provided this quote during interviews.
Lair would not verify it, citing police policies that forbid officers from indentifying confidential informants, and he did not challenge it while reviewing the passage for accuracy.

In the weeks before her arrest in Kaufman County, she had essentially taken over the job of three-waying mail. Little by little, her connection to powerful ABT officers grew, and her romantic interest in Red waned.

Three days after she got out of jail, Carol ditched him and moved to Odessa, a city with a small but violent ABT cell.

She persuaded a Brother there to pay for her bus ticket.

After he picked her up at the station, Carol showed her appreciation in the back seat. Hours later, she bonded with an ABT captain, and that night, she worked her mojo on a major.

“I felt like I had the place wired,” she said, “pretty much from the moment I walked in.”

People called Carol a “bro ho,” but she continued to seduce – with and without sex.

This outpost was a gathering spot for members of a small but violent ABT cell in Odessa. Carol Blevins’ time in Odessa was her most productive period as a confidential informant. (Nathan Hunsinger/Staff Photographer)

“Officers eat first, right?” she said one night, delivering a plate of food.

She doted on the gang’s patriarch, an aging heroin addict, and kept his house spotless. She connected gang members to Dallas drug dealers. She deferred during public discussions, but in private, offered her ideas.

Five years of experience paid off.

Carol disarmed the Brothers with her featherwood training, impressed them with her connections and deceived them with habitual lying she learned as an addict.

Mentally, Carol slipped in beside the gang’s leaders.

They got inside her head, too.

“It was an honor to be theirs, to be one of them,” Carol said. “I’d never had more friends or been more close to people. In some ways, Odessa was the best part of my life.”

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She pecked out most intel a letter at a time – snatches of conversation that might implicate people in unsolved crimes, serial numbers on guns, combinations to safes.

“No one ever looked at my phone,” said Carol, who memorized phone numbers for eight federal agents. “But I was careful, and I was always nervous about it.”

One afternoon, luck and an old couch kept her alive.

Carol knew the ABT had bought a collection of stolen assault rifles, and her handlers wanted photos and serial numbers.

She believed the guns were stashed in an ABT major’s trailer.

Carol made him a heavy lunch and pretended to watch TV as his eyes sagged shut on the sofa.

Minutes later, cat quiet, she gentled clothes aside in his dark closet, feeling in corners and across the carpeted floor. Nothing. She climbed on a stool and checked shelves. Nada.

Cellphone in hand, Carol wiggled halfway under his bed, using the screen for light. Then, on the other side of the wall, she heard the couch springs whimper, then groan.

Heart thumping, she reverse low-crawled out and dashed on tiptoes into the hallway – just as the bedroom door swung open.

Survival skills

Love and loyalty, in Carol’s world, are often a means to an end.

She felt a part of something meaningful in Odessa. Not the crime, or compulsive violence, necessarily, but she relished her role in the cohesive and dysfunctional family.

Besides, she is an addict and an opportunist, and the ABT moved a lot of dope that summer. Any attempt to understand Carol has to begin with her insatiable need for a high.

She also embraced the gang’s Balkanized thinking on race.

“I loved being needed and having a place and a purpose,” she said recently. “I had something I believed in. I still kinda do. I still mostly do.”

Even so, Carol gave up the gang’s every move.

Each day, she’d peck out text messages and click twice.

Once to send, the other to delete – an Etch-A-Sketch way of erasing the contradiction.

The Brotherhood holds “church” the second Saturday of each month, a meeting more sinister than spiritual.

Dues must be paid (usually 10 percent of crime profits), discipline is administered (beatings for tardiness, disrespect), and officers occasionally order underlings to carry out retribution-style hits.

Carol became numb to the violence, a survival skill she learned earlier in her life as a featherwood.

She once lured a man to a warehouse in Dallas, where Brothers waited. He falsely claimed membership in the ABT and had its “patch” inked on his chest, a shield pierced by a Nordic dagger.

Gang members tackled him, wrapped chains around his wrists, and pulled him off his feet. Then, with a switchblade, they cut the Brotherhood’s prized tattoo off his chest.

Carol remembers a mousepad-size chunk of flesh pulling free in pieces, oozing blood that turned into liquid sheets, and the way his body crumpled when it hit the floor.

Once, gang members used a blowtorch to melt a tattoo off the torso of a man who had questioned the orders of an ABT officer. Albert “Sidetrack” Parker (right) survived the attack, but was later murdered by a man who aspired to join the Brotherhood.

Once, gang members used a blowtorch to melt a tattoo off the torso of a man who had questioned the orders of an ABT officer. Albert “Sidetrack” Parker (bottom) survived the attack, but was later murdered by a man who aspired to join the Brotherhood.

Skitz’s legend

Years ago, an ABT general ordered a hit on James “Skitz” Sampsell because he had failed to kill another man. Gang assassins shot him in the face and left him for dead.

But Skitz was so high on meth, the story goes, he was able to crawl a mile through a desert to a highway, where he was rescued.

Legend shrouds many ABT leaders, especially those like Skitz, who rise to become generals.

In his case, some of the myth seems to fit the man.

Over time, James “Skitz” Sampsell’s suspicions of Carol grew.

His left cheek puckers without supporting bone, where the .45 round ripped through, and cobblestone skin flares around scar tissue collected along his jaw, and down the neck.

Skitz never held much of a grudge about the shooting, understanding what he’d signed up for. In fact, he took pride in the survival story, and the aura of invincibility it cast on him.

He told Carol the grisly tale a dozen times, more.

Skitz wanted her, always had, so after his wife left him (and started working for the feds), he called Carol.

A few days later, she climbed into his red Chevy pickup in Garland. Agents followed them to an Extended Stay hotel in Fort Worth. They smoked meth most of two days.

“There were some intimate moments,” Carol said. “We slept in the same bed.”

ABT generals usually don’t buy their own dope. Too risky.

Skitz scored two pounds at a time from the Mexican Mafia and paid an extra $2,000 to have it delivered to Odessa. But when police took down his dealer, he had to find his own supply in Dallas.

He turned the run into a regular booty call.

Carol’s phone rang on Nov. 9, 2012.

“Did you see the news?’” Skitz asked, tears in his voice. “They arrested my whole family tonight.”

The feds had unsealed a sweeping RICO indictment in Houston, charging 34 members of the Brotherhood with murder, assault, robbery and other crimes.

“It was tense … because we really dropped a hammer on those guys,” said Karpel, the Justice Department’s lead attorney. “We were concerned about officer safety, and we were concerned about prosecutor safety.”

Fearing ABT retaliation, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Hileman eventually withdrew from the case.

The feds charged every ABT general, except Skitz.

“He knew he was going to jail, he just didn’t know exactly when it was going to happen,” Carol said. “On some level, he knew it was me, but I think he cared too much to do anything about it. We loved each other.”

At some point, agents say, most confidential informants experience a chip in their resolve, like taking a rock to the windshield. For some, the crack runs until it obstructs their view; for others, it’s a minor distraction.

In a melancholy moment, Carol confided in Lair.

“You know, he’s good to me,” she said, voice painted with guilt. She noticed hardness in her handler’s eyes. “But you know I’m going to do it.”

Agents pushed and Carol delivered.

Heading west

Using Carol’s intel, the DEA took down a major meth dealer in Odessa. Days later, agents pulled over a Brother who’d packed a fake carburetor with drugs. Carol was the common link.

Skitz’s eyes clouded when he took a call about the second bust, on Christmas Eve in Midland.

Suspicion coalesced around Carol.

“Skitz, you know I didn’t …”

He cut her off.

“Right now I don’t know what to believe.”

The feds paid Carol $1,500 after the arrests.

She spent Christmas morning at home with her parents, a knot in her stomach, exchanging text messages with Skitz and a federal agent in Odessa.

Her worlds were about to collide.

On one side, the ABT’s distrust boiled; on the other, ambitious agents were one arrest away from running the table on the Brotherhood.

Skitz asked Carol to meet at a hotel on New Year’s Eve, the night before he planned to leave for West Texas.

She texted details to Lair, who called back the next morning with a suggestion wrapped in a question: “Do you think he’d take you back to Odessa?”

Carol was way ahead of him.

“I already set it up,” she said. “We’re leaving in the morning.”

What neither one knew was this: Skitz didn’t invite Carol to Odessa for companionship.